


The Quiet Man

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-08 22:32:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson has been separated from Sherlock Holmes for most of nineteen years when Mycroft Holmes whisks him away to see his brother and convince him to come home. </p><p>A "fix it" fic with ample spoilers for Season 3 of Sherlock.  Author's notes are at the end of the fic and contain spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One Man's Island

Five years in a heartbeat. Ten in a blink. He closes his eyes and five more are gone.

Baby days to school days and before he knows it she’s away in Austrailia for her gap year and he’s not too far from sixty.

Alone again. 

Mary’s been gone four years now, and he visits her today in the quiet churchyard, drops a white rose on the grass where she sleeps, and tries to tell her that it’s no good anymore. Annie is on her own and the flat is too quiet and the rain bothers his leg and there’s crap on the telly and his job is boring and predictable and he hasn’t heard from Sherlock since she died and that was an e-mail sent to Mycroft and printed out and handed to him at the fucking wake.

Sherlock Holmes who is still paying the penalties nineteen years later. A lifetime sentence at His Majesty’s service.

Mycroft Holmes.

Mycroft who loves his brother. Mycroft who understood the truth.

A life no longer his own. Living on borrowed time, permanently on-call, alive in some world, but not in John’s world.

They’d each killed a man to save the other, but with such different consequences. John killed and found himself irrefutably bound to Sherlock. Sherlock killed and found himself taken from John.

Sherlock Holmes.

His best friend. His greatest sacrifice. His deepest regret.

And even with Sherlock on his mind, heavier and more present than usual, he is still surprised to find Mycroft Holmes standing alone outside the churchyard when he leaves. He’s dressed impeccably, and carries his cane over his arm. They face each other wordlessly, and Mycroft nods at the black car waiting, and John, with more direction in life than he’s had in years, walks toward it without comment, and is surprised again when Mycroft joins him in the backseat.

They travel in silence, John’s eyes on the countryside as they slip outside of London. 

Nearly an hour passes before he speaks. It is an interminably long hour, a waiting for the surgeon to come through the door hour, a _fuck I have the worst hangover_ hour. 

“He’s not dead,” John says. He does not like – barely recognizes –his voice. It breaks, cracks, is brittle with emotion he should not feel after all these years. “You could tell me that in London.”

Mycroft shifts beside him. 

“No,” he says, carefully. “He’s not dead.”

“This is about him, though.” Of course it’s about him. Every significant piece of his life from the time measured by _after Afghanastan_ was about him. Even the missing years. Especially the missing years. 

Even the pieces with Mary and Annie. Especially the pieces with them. There’d have been no _them_ without _him_. He’d have left her in a heartbeat when she confessed her sins had Sherlock not been there to stay his hand, push him back to her, put a bullet in Charles Augustus Magnussen.

Because she lied.

Because she wasn’t Mary Morstan.

Because she struck first with a bullet in Sherlock Holmes.

She was, ultimately, a substitute, and he could never quite forgive her for taking Sherlock from him. Misplaced blame, perhaps. Blame he never voiced but always carried, blame that pushed against the fragile trust that grew between them in the years that followed.

“This is about my brother,” Mycroft’s voice interrupts his thoughts as the car navigates a roundabout. “This is most certainly about Sherlock.”

“And you’re taking me to see him?”

“You haven’t seen him in a very long time, John.”

John looks sidelong at Mycroft Holmes and studies his face, imagining what Sherlock must look like now. Grey hair, lined face, diminished, somehow, shoulders rounded, spectacles a permanent fixture over those penetrating eyes.

“No, I haven’t. Nine years ago – the anniversary trip we took to Prague. And I never thanked you for that.”

“Your choice of destination was fortuitous,” Mycroft says dismissively.

“You know what I mean. And thank you.”

John has never liked Mycroft Holmes, but he’s a different man than he was nineteen years ago. He sees deeper. He sees through shields and lies that once reflected back at him, confusing him, blinding him. He rode a rollercoaster for years, never quite knowing, never quite trusting, learning through the years that sometimes love isn’t enough, but sometimes it’s all you have and all you cannot shed, no matter the miles and years that separate you.

He didn’t understand then. He understands now.

He loved Mary once. 

And if love could be separated into like units, weighed and measured, he knows he would conclude that he loved Sherlock more. 

He won’t – doesn’t – admit to Mycroft Holmes that not a day goes by when he doesn’t think of Sherlock – remember Sherlock – miss Sherlock. He’s hopelessly addicted to Sherlock Holmes and there isn’t a rehab program in the world that will work, because Sherlock’s in his heart and soul and only an exorcism, or death itself, will cure him. And for nineteen years he’s only had Sherlock in bits and pieces, and if the space of those years is a jigsaw puzzle and every text and e-mail and phone call and rare visit is a single piece, he’s hardly got the edges together after nearly two decades.

He rubs his eyes, pushing his own glasses out of the way. His heart is beating too fast. He wants to know but doesn’t want to know. But it’s not adding up and that old feeling is coming back, flooding his veins. His hand clenches reflexively.

He’s too old for this. This feeling. This surge. It’s a part of his past. Locked up on the day he said goodbye to Sherlock, for good but not for good, shook his hand, watched him leave with Mary wrapped in his arms, and Sherlock wrapped around his heart. 

“You’ve never brought me to him before. Something’s happened.”

“Something has happened,” repeats Mycroft. He fiddles with the buttons on his coat then straightens his back and looks out the window as the car pulls off the road and John looks up to see the waiting helicopter.

He frowns.

He hates helicopters.

But five minutes later, he’s in the helicopter beside Mycroft, and there’s ocean beneath them, and he’s not asked where they’re going, or what has happened.

But now Mycroft hands him a folder, and he opens it and his practiced eyes scan through the pages, once, then again. His heart is in his shoes as he glances at Mycroft, who is staring resolutely out the window, then he closes the folder, and closes his eyes.

Sherlock Holmes is blind.

Sherlock - _Sherlock_ \- is blind.

His lips press together and he drops his head back onto the seat and he cannot imagine those eyes without that spark, cannot imagine that brain with no visual clues to process. Cannot imagine how a man like Sherlock can exist in darkness. Cannot fathom how he will still be of use to the crown.

They are flying lower, and the sea is turbulent below them. Of course it would be an island. A prison without walls for the sightless man. 

ooOoo

They stand together against a low stone wall as the helicopter takes off. John watches it go, oddly complacent, not even wondering how long it will be until it returns for them. 

“What do you want from me?” John asks, turning to face Mycroft, to look him in the eye. 

He’s gotten to the root of it, of course, because he’s John Watson and he knows that people like Mycroft Holmes love their brothers but don’t have a clue what they really need.

“He’s been pardoned,” Mycroft says. “And he refuses to return to London.”

“Pardoned,” John repeats. He has a sudden urge to grab Mycroft by the collar and press him up against the wall, twisting his hand, tightening that collar, until he gasps for breath.

“Pardoned,” Mycroft confirms. As if in acknowledgement of John’s unspoken urge, he adjusts the collar of his coat. “In consideration of his injuries, and his years of service.”

“And you want me to convince him to go back to London?” John asks. 

“I want you to give him a reason to,” corrects Mycroft. “I think you owe him that.”

John does not bristle. Mycroft is right, and he accepts that. He owes Sherlock.

And he doesn’t know what Sherlock has become over these two decades of answering to Mycroft and to the bloody Home Office, but a decade ago, in that hotel room in Prague, he was every bit the Sherlock he knew. And when Mary smiled at Sherlock and kissed John on the cheek then slipped from the room, the tension was sharp as a knife and thick as blood for five seconds, then melted away in a rush of adrenaline, a press of bodies, a tangle of limbs.

 _No pity_ , he tells himself as he walks to the house where Sherlock Holmes is living, Mycroft at his side. He asks the questions he needs to ask, the knot in his stomach as tight as it’s ever been. _How has he adjusted? What does he do to pass the time? How does he get around?_ And when Mycroft opens the door and steps inside, he follows quietly behind, 

The house is sturdy both inside and out. The rooms are open and sparsely but comfortably furnished, one leading into another. John notices the absence of light first, then the absence of clutter and finally, the absence of Sherlock.

Mycroft points to the doors beside the fireplace.

“He’ll be out there,” he says. “He spends most days out of doors. He says the walls are oppressive.”

John moves without comment to the doors and pauses to gather himself, like a man about to walk into a surprise party that’s actually not a surprise at all. He reaches for the handle, then drops his arm to his side and turns to face Mycroft. 

“Did he ask for me?” he asks, because he needs to know. “Does he know you went for me?”

Mycroft shakes his head.

“He doesn’t wish to be a _burden_.” He rolls his eyes.

John looks away. _Drama Queen,_ he thinks, remembering another conversation altogether, almost - _almost_ \- fondly.

“You do realize this isn’t going to turn out how you want it to?” he asks.

“I’m rather counting on it, actually,” Mycroft replies. 

For the first time, John smiles.

ooOoo

The doors open onto a large screened porch, which in turn opens onto a wide veranda. He can see the sea through the porch screens, and even here he can smell and taste the salt in the wind. He is reminded, suddenly, of the taste of tears.

It has been a very, very long time since he’s cried.

“You should announce yourself, Mycroft. It’s only polite, considering.”

John blinks and stares into a corner of the porch where Sherlock is sitting on a wicker chair. His voice is as it always has been. John cannot see him clearly in the shadows, and he moves closer, one step, then two, three, until he can make out Sherlock’s familiar profile. He wishes he’d had more time to think, to rehearse, to consider what he should say. The lump is back in his throat, and he swallows it down.

“It’s not Mycroft, Sherlock.” He steps forward again as Sherlock turns his head toward his voice. 

His voice catches as he speaks.

He watches Sherlock’s face, sees the honest reaction before the mask comes down. Surprise. Fear. 

Blessed, blessed relief.

Sherlock carefully places something on the table before him. A small device, no bigger than a mobile. A voice recorder, John thinks. His movements are precise, calculated. He doesn’t fumble like John imagines a blind man would.

“I didn’t expect you, John,” he says. His voice is rough with disuse, perhaps emotion. He makes no attempt to stand. His head is canted toward John, at exactly the right angle. There are, as yet, no clues that this man cannot see.

“No, I expect you didn’t,” John replies. He is studying Sherlock, this older Sherlock. Over-long hair, flecked with grey, hides most of the scarring on his face. There are lines about his eyes, beside his mouth. He is dressed carelessly in dressing gown and cotton trousers. Beside him, in another wicker chair, rest his violin and bow.

John wants to say what he might have said nineteen years ago when presented with _this_ Sherlock.

_You look like shit, Sherlock._

_Why the_ fuck _didn’t you tell me you’ve been pardoned?_

_Why didn’t you call?_

But those are questions for another day and he says nothing.

He takes a step closer.

He knows that Sherlock hears him, feels him, as he steps around the table. He sees the guarded look on his face. He hates that look on Sherlock. It doesn’t suit him. But Sherlock covers it again, quickly, with that mask of indifference, and the emotion is gone and he is just…there. 

John steps into the vee of Sherlock’s legs, invading his space without apology, then lowers himself to his knees, ceding his sighted advantage as he wraps his arms around Sherlock.

“You are a complete idiot,” he says into Sherlock’s shoulder, and he is laughing, and crying, and clinging to Sherlock, and it feels so fucking good but it feels a million times better when Sherlock’s arms tighten around him. And Sherlock says his name, exhales it on a sigh, says it again as his hand works into John’s hair, then down his neck, across his shoulders, over his back. The touch is not light, not gentle, but insistent, a mother checking that her progeny has all its fingers and toes, that the child who tumbled down the stairs is still hearty and whole.

“You’ll die of boredom here,” John says a few minutes later. He is holding Sherlock’s face between his hands, gazing at the damage the blast has left there. Sherlock has had the best plastic surgeons the country could provide, and the scarring is much less than he’d have expected.

“Mycroft wants me to go to London to retire,” Sherlock says. He has borne John’s scrutiny patiently. The conversation is stilted, only half there, but there is no awkwardness. There may be empty spaces, but they are filled with words already said, knowledge so ingrained that it doesn’t bear repeating.

“You never wanted to retire in London,” John says, and there is a catch in his voice, as he wonders how a blind man can keep bees alone.

He knows the answer. A blind man can keep bees, but not alone.

“Actually, I’ve been rethinking my retirement plans.” Sherlock lifts a hand, and, using John’s arm as a guide, feels his way to John’s head. He touches the side of John’s face, skirts fingers lightly over his nose, brushes his mouth. John knows he is being read, analyzed, Sherlock’s fingers observing him as thoroughly as his eyes once did. The texture of his face, the last time he shaved, the weave of his jumper, the weight of his glasses by the indentation on his nose, the half stone he’s gained since Mary died.

“You’ve been here for three months,” John says. Sherlock’s fingers are on his lips as he speaks, and they move down to his throat, their touch light, unapologetic. And he knows it sounds trite, and utterly sappy, but he has to say it because he means it, because he wants it. “I think it’s time you come home.”

“Mycroft has already offered,” Sherlock says, voice strangely flat. 

John laughs. Takes Sherlock’s face in his hands again. “You don’t answer to Mycroft anymore,” he said. “And that’s not what I meant by home.”

And when John remembers it later, it is important that it was Sherlock who pressed forward first to kiss him, that it was Sherlock Holmes who reminded John Watson that home was not really a _place_ at all.

 

_End Part One_


	2. What Sherlock Wants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John learns something important about Sherlock, and Sherlock discovers something important about John.

Part 2

Sherlock has a cane, apps on his mobile and tablet for the visually impaired, and a digital voice recorder. He’s rejected Mycroft’s offer of a guide dog and a Braille instructor. The organisational system set up for him has been blown to hell, because he’s determined to learn to tell everything by touch – even colours – and not rely on a specific order in his drawers and closets, or on _anyone_ to lay out his clothing. The refrigerator is an unmitigated disaster, and John is reluctant to sample anything in it, though it alerts Sherlock by beeping when left open for too long. The chargers for mobile and tablet and voice recorder are neatly laid out on the countertop, lifelines that they are, obviously more important than healthy meals. The electric kettle on the kitchen counter whistles when it comes to a boil, and a clock on a table near the door announces the time when it is touched.

Hours have passed, and Mycroft has gone, and John sits on the veranda in an insanely comfortable chair and stares at the sea while Sherlock sleeps on the wide sofa on the porch.

John is thinking.

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth and he gives a lopsided grin to the wind and the waves, and touches his lips with two fingers. He thought he was past his kissing days, too old for an impassioned snog, but he knows now, with the certainty of death, that those days are really only just beginning. 

When he opened that file, while Mycroft stared dispassionately out the helicopter window, his mind already made up about Sherlock and what he needed, John immediately saw the problem. Deprived of key sensory input, Sherlock Holmes would be out of balance. While others, in the guise of help, would try to order and organise things around him, Sherlock would in fact have to reorder his thinking, rearrange his mind palace, fill in the void left by the absence of one sense with more of the others. 

He’d had five senses, each of them contributing information, yet never equally. 

Vision hadn’t mattered in the least when John had knelt within the vee of Sherlock’s legs. He’d thought they were on even ground then, when he’d closed his eyes into that kiss, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Sherlock, sightless now for three months, needed just as much stimuli, just as much data, so what he could not see, he felt, he tasted. 

He’d consumed John with fingers and lips, with hands and mouth. If sweetness there was, if tenderness and wonder, it was there for only a breath then swallowed by hunger, by the insatiable need to take and to catalogue. John had been kissed by Sherlock before, had spent an hour in his arms while Mary had coffee in the café across from the hotel in Prague, had taken it as the gift that is was. Finite. Shaken, unwrapped, worn once then pressed into the back of the drawer where fingers skirted over it time and again, but never again pulled it out. A shirt too small, a jumper too worn, a style from another day.

John’s knees were hurting but he buried his head in Sherlock’s shoulder, squeezed his arms tightly around Sherlock’s back, as Sherlock spoke softly in his ear.

“You live above an Italian restaurant, on a busy corner along a bus route. You’ve given up your aftershave, rather obvious, really, needn’t bother with that one. Whitening toothpaste, with fluoride. There’s a dog in your building, at least one, possibly two, one of them large, and you pet it when you pass. You have a closet full of shirts Annie’s made you buy, but you don’t wear them. The one you’ve on is at least four years old and beginning to wear rather badly. You don’t shave every day, but you’re still at a surgery, part-time. You don’t get enough exercise, watch too much telly, and you thought you were ready to retire.”

“I am ready to retire,” John had said, pressing his mouth against Sherlock’s ear. “I’ve looked at a cottage or two.”

“In Sussex,” Sherlock had said. “A lovely place to retire, when one’s ready. And I don’t think you are, John. Not yet.”

John lets his mind wander now, still staring at the sea. He’s sated. They’d gone inside to sprawl on Sherlock’s unmade bed, and had rested there in each other’s arms. Sherlock had worked his fingers beneath John’s shirt, and had mapped out John’s chest and belly and shoulders, learning the shape and feel of the old scar, obsessively working it into memory.

And while John’s hands strayed beneath Sherlock’s loose cotton sleep shirt, he studiously, determinedly, avoided the scar on his chest. The scar from the bullet that nearly took Sherlock from him.

But Sherlock had known.

Had taken John’s hand in one of his own. Had held it against the middle of his chest, letting John absorb the pulse of the beating heart, then moved it to the precise spot where Mary Morstan Watson’s bullet had entered.

He remembers it now, the feel of the skin beneath his fingers, the taste and texture beneath his lips, the colour, the outline.

It isn’t the worst scar Sherlock has earned, but it’s the one he earned for John.

They deserve their peaceful retirement, but John knows that neither of them wants it, not really, not yet.

He thinks about bees. He’s never liked them much, has never been fascinated by the impossibility of their flight, or their social structure, or given much thought to the nuances of taste in honey. He’s treated too many people with life-threatening reactions to bee stings to want to delve too deeply into bee-keeping as a hobby.

He’s never been stung, not even once, but now he formulates an experiment in his mind. A trip to Bart’s, a deliberate sting, observation to be sure he’s not allergic.

Because some day there will be a cottage in Sussex, and bees for Sherlock, if that’s what he wants.

He stands and breathes deeply, then goes inside to find a jacket, because Mycroft didn’t take him home to pick up suitable clothing, and didn’t warn him in that churchyard that he’d be leaving him on a windy island. Sherlock is still sleeping on the long wicker sofa with the ugly flowered cushions, and he looks entirely too peaceful. He’s on his side, with one fist pressed up against his cheek, and John thinks he looks young and vulnerable, and knows he is neither.

And while he’s inside, he forgets the jacket in favor of tea. He’s already had a look around the place, after Sherlock fell asleep and before he planted himself on the veranda chair, but he takes a second walk around now, mug of tea in hand, and spends an inordinate amount of time in the loo, staring into the mirror, picking up the toothbrush, studying the razor, examining the bottle of Oxycontin, noting the absence of standard OTC pain relief. The bathroom needs a good cleaning, as does the bedroom where Sherlock sleeps. John picks a dozen unmatched socks from the floor, and notices, for the first time, what is missing.

Books. Magazines. Papers. Post-its and index cards tacked to the walls. Photographs. Bus and train schedules. The detritus of Sherlock’s case studies, investigations, experiments.

He sinks to the bed as the hard truth sinks in even more deeply, through skin to sinew to bone itself before settling in his soul.

And later, as they sit together after the sun has set, side by side on the sofa, Sherlock explains, when John prods with a failed delicacy, that when he misses the light, he sits in the sun and lets it warm his skin, and knows, at least, that the light is there despite the darkness, to spite the darkness. When he loses his socks, he has Mycroft bring him more. And when he misses the words on the page, he calls up a favorite work on his mobile, on his e-reader, and lets the spoken word stand in for the silent, printed one.

And a man without cases does not need a wall full of photographs and index cards.

Blindness is an inconvenience. And he has had far worse inconveniences in his life.

And John thinks he is lying, despite the sentiment.

Blindness has made his other senses stronger.

John agrees with this, and remembers the greedy touch of fingers and lips, and thinks Sherlock _should_ learn Braille and devour books with his touch just as he’s devoured John.

Blindness has changed his life, but other things – the pardon, the bullet – have changed it more.

“Come back to London,” John asks that night, when darkness has fallen and the moon is new, and they are lying together in Sherlock’s bed.

“So you can take care of me?” asks Sherlock. He lies on his side beside John, who is on his back, staring at the ceiling. Sherlock’s hand moves down John’s chest, smoothing the sparse hair, running down over his belly, just beneath the elastic of his borrowed pyjama bottoms. 

“So I can make you eat something mould-free, at least,” John says. He covers Sherlock’s hand with his own, entwines their fingers together. “And actually, I was more hoping you would take care of me.”

It’s a proposal, of sorts, and he waits, quietly, for a response.

“Take care of you,” Sherlock repeats. “You’ve been getting along fine without me.” He rolls to his back and lies shoulder to shoulder with John. Their hands are still entwined, resting on John’s stomach. 

“No. Not really.” John rests his other hand atop their joined ones. “Been rather bored, actually.”

“Ah –right. That retirement cottage in Sussex,” Sherlock says. “So, I’m to be your cure for boredom?”

“And other things.” John frees one hand and pokes his index finger into Sherlock’s flank. “You’d stir things up, at least. We’d have interesting people traipsing through the flat. Might even be able to get Greg to drop in – for old times sake, and all.”

“Greg?”

John pokes Sherlock again and Sherlock covers a smile. “Lestrade, you idiot.” A long silence follows. The squeeze their joined hands together. “He used to try to engage me, you know. Ask my opinion on cases.” He sighs. “I just couldn’t.”

“Cases.” Sherlock says the word with a sigh, and it’s a lament of sorts, to days gone by when detective work was his drug of choice and John his co-addict. 

“We could do it again,” John says, daring to suggest it. “In London. My flat – or we could look for another. Something that would work for you, too.”

“You want to solve crimes again. You want to do _cases_ with me.” Sherlock sounds incredulous, and he laughs. 

“What? Are you thinking about taking up a different career this late in life?” John asks. “Clerk at Tesco’s? Tour guide at Buckingham Palace?”

“I don’t meet the dress code,” Sherlock says, blandly.

John laughs, and Sherlock asks, “Is it too early to write my memoir?” 

“So you don’t want to solve crimes?” John says. He’s a bit sad at that thought, but really, he’s fine with anything, and can take a photography class, or perhaps get back into blogging, while Sherlock works on his book.

“Crime scene investigation is hardly an option. I’d trip all over the bodies.”

John rolls his eyes. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Sherlock says. He rolls over, so much more agile than John, and straddles him, silencing him, for a moment, with a kiss.

“It does matter,” John says, after a proper snog which has not made him forget the question at all. He smooths down Sherlock’s hair, kisses the corner of his mouth. “What you want matters.”

Sherlock, draped over John, head resting on his shoulder, breathes quietly. John counts the exhalations, and waits.

“I want to tend bees in Sussex,” Sherlock admits at last. “But I’ll settle for curing your boredom first – giving you a reason to want to retire.”

John closes his eyes, victory close. “We’ll look for a flat, then, when we get back.”

“We don’t need a flat,” Sherlock says quietly. There is a lilt to his voice, though, as he snuggles closer. “We have 221B.”

ooOoo

And indeed, they do have 221B. Mycroft has purchased it – not just 221B, but all of 221, so there are living quarters available without stairs. But they remind John too much of Mrs. Hudson, so they climb the narrow stairs instead, Sherlock ahead of John, and step into the space that was, all too briefly, their home.

The flat is furnished as it ever was, and John wonders how Mrs. Hudson made do without new tenants. Sherlock navigates it as if he never left, edges around John’s chair, into the kitchen, down the corridor to the bedroom and the loo. 

The neighborhood has changed, and they take some time to learn it, and in that time the papers get word of the famous detective’s return. And now he is the blind detective, and people are bringing him cases, puzzles to solve, mysteries to unravel. And they can be selective, and take only the most interesting ones. And if eyes are needed, observations of color and light and photographs and the layout of a room, John’s eyes must suffice.

Weeks pass in a heartbeat, months in the blink of an eye. It was not easy with Mary and it is even less so with Sherlock. He is given to fits of depression, to run-on, sleepless nights, to spur-of-the-moment forays into the streets of London, his cane left behind, and John on his heels. 

He mourns his lost sight through his music, painful, melancholic strains played out through his bow, and on nights when the music consumes him, John goes to bed alone.

There are books in the flat, and one day John wakes, alone in bed, to find that Sherlock has spent the night making origami cranes and swans and doves from the pages of Gray’s Anatomy, and has flown them, one by one, from the window of the flat down onto the street below. 

He solves cold cases for the Met, a serial killer, the theft of a rare document. 

John sometimes forgets Sherlock cannot see, and John is never, ever, bored.

And one day, in early summer, Sherlock is sprawled on the sofa, head in John’s lap while John reads aloud to him, when there is a knock on the door. John rises to answer it, and there is a shriek of glee from the landing, an answering exclamation from John, and then Annie Watson is being introduced to Sherlock Holmes, and they talk and laugh and go out for dinner and finally, hours later, she is set up in Mrs. Hudson’s old rooms, private and cozy, sleeping off her jet lag.

And John settles on the couch again, beside Sherlock, and he is happy. Happy that they seemed to all get along just fine. That Annie is back, if only for a week. 

But Sherlock is quiet, much more so than usual. He is holding something in, and John thinks it must be Annie. He wonders if he is jealous, or uncomfortable around her, or if he simply didn’t like her.

Then suddenly he knows.

He doesn’t think of it often. Hasn’t for most of her life, in fact. He’d fallen in love with her when they’d placed her in his hands. He’d expected it to matter before that, but it hadn’t.

But he suddenly sees the error. Sees the deception through Sherlock’s point of view.

He pretends that he hasn’t noticed Sherlock’s silence, his disquiet. 

_Let it go. Let it go._

“Does she know?” asks Sherlock when they are in bed together, Sherlock spooned behind him.

He could pretend he doesn’t understand. He does not.

“No,” he answers. “And I’d prefer it stay that way.”

Sherlock, who could not see Annie’s features, who did not touch her, who only heard her voice, and spent several hours with her, listening to her stories, her exuberance, has deduced what John learned before she was born.

That Annie Watson is not John Watson’s biological daughter.

Sherlock’s arm tightens around him. 

“John…” he begins, but fades into silence, and does not go on.

And John fills in the blanks.

And in the morning, Sherlock is gone.

_End Part 2_


	3. Roundabout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock confronts John on Annie's parentage and realizes that it just doesn't matter.

Part 3

John wakes in the morning, alone, Sherlock’s pillow already cold beside him. He rolls out of bed and fumbles for his glasses, then searches the flat for Sherlock, even climbing up the dusty stairs to the second bedroom they use only for storage these days. Sherlock’s clothing is still here, and his tablet. He’s taken only his mobile, and some of the emergency money they keep in a biscuit tin on the shelf above the electric kettle. John looks, but can’t find his cane. Good.

An hour into his frenzy, which includes a search of Mrs. Hudson’s old quarters where Annie still sleeps away the effects of her long flight, he finally thinks to check his mobile for a message from Sherlock.

 _\- It matters. -_

John knows exactly what Sherlock means.

It’s too late, of course. Much too late for explanations or excuses. It was a deception born of love. For Mary, for Annie, and for Sherlock.

Sherlock was already gone when Mary, seven and a half months pregnant, told him that the baby she was carrying was not his.

He didn’t ask for details then – he’d learned them later. He stared at her, already drowning in regret, then punched the wall, breaking his hand in two places, and stormed out to take himself to A&E. He was gone four days. He got so pissed that first night he woke up in an alley with a black eye and a bloody lip, and cried, _cried_ for Sherlock.

But Sherlock was gone, and Magnussen was dead, and it was too late. Too bloody late.

Lestrade had found him, face bruised, drowning his sorrows in a pub. Found him just in time to rush him to the hospital, where Mary had gone into premature labour.

Mary almost died. If there was any doubt in John’s mind that the baby wasn’t his, it was put to rest by her illness. She was RH negative, and so was he, but the baby was positive, and she barely got the RhIg injection in time. And it shouldn’t have been such a problem with a first pregnancy, but as it turned out, it wasn’t her first. 

For there was another stillborn baby, born years ago when she was not yet out of her teens, forever asleep in another churchyard far, far away.

But by the time he discovered any of this, John Watson had made his decision. He made it the moment they laid Annie in his arms. 

And now, nineteen years later, he leaves Annie a note telling her he’s got an appointment, some errands to run.

Then he sits on the stairs, mobile in hand.

Nineteen years ago, Sherlock Holmes put a bullet through a man’s head to give John and Mary and their unborn child a chance at happiness.

No. Strike that.

Nineteen years ago, Sherlock Holmes put a bullet through a man’s head to give John Watson a chance at happiness with his wife, the woman he loved, who was carrying their unborn child.

That bullet, that act, sent Sherlock into exile. 

And Mary, so it goes, slept with another man during the flurry of the wedding plans, the interviews, the napkin folding, the Best Man speech preparation. While she and John shared a flat, professed their love for one another, registered for wedding gifts and planned their honeymoon, Mary was unfaithful.

Shit. 

He knows what this must look like to Sherlock. He’d guessed. He’d _deduced._ He knows who Annie Watson is.

He thinks – he must think – that Mary wasn’t worthy of John’s love, nor of Sherlock’s protection. He had condemned himself for them, for their happiness, and she didn’t deserve John at all.

She’d told John, four years later, during an over-heated argument, that she’d gotten her first foot into Magnussen’s organisation by seducing a bodyguard. 

A lie. Another lie. But by then, John had guessed the truth, and despite the betrayal, loved Annie all the more.

He shifts now on the stairs, lets out a slow breath. He doesn’t think about this anymore and it hurts to acknowledge the truth.

Sherlock gets along well enough in their neighborhood, well enough that John doesn’t try to follow him anymore when he goes out to the café across the street, or to buy an occasional pack of cigarettes. He’s gone further on his own, in cabs that take him to meetings and engagements where someone is meeting him on the other end. They’ve walked together through the parks and gardens, Hyde and Kensington and some of the smaller green spaces.

Where will Sherlock have gone this morning?

But of course, John knows.

If Sherlock has guessed correctly – and of course he has – there’s only one place he’ll be heading, one man he will need to see.

John takes the time to compose a text to Sherlock before he grabs a cab.

_\- It matters to me too. I’d like to explain. Where are you? -_

His mobile vibrates as he’s sliding into a cab just outside 221B.

_\- No idea. -_

He gives the cabbie an address and tells himself not to panic as he replies to Sherlock.

_\- How did you get there? -_

_-Cab to Meicraft’s. Changed my mind. Walked.-_

John stares at the words. _Changed my mind._ He lets out a breath of relief, and doesn’t even chuckle at the way the voice recognition software massacred Mycroft’s name.

_\- Are you somewhere safe? -_

_\- Not sure.-_

John tamps down the instinct to panic and pulls up the social media check-in app.

_-Check in.-_

_-Hate that app.-_

_-CHECK IN.-_

He wonders if Sherlock’s text to voice app will interpret the caps and shout at him. 

_-Fine.-_

He waits, staring at the app as Sherlock is suddenly pinned to a busy Starbucks location.

Starbucks? Sherlock?

_-Stay put. Do not move.-_

John gives the new address to the cabbie and fifteen minutes later hops out on the curb, facing one of the ubiquitous American coffee shops that have taken over the London landscape. 

Sherlock is not inside. John checks the seating area in the back, even the loo, then heads back outside and looks right and left then across and…fuck.

How the _hell_ had he made it to the middle of a roundabout?

But there he is, standing beside a statue of someone who could be Winston Churchill, or Horatio Nelson, or maybe even Queen Victoria. Hard to tell with the morning sun at this angle.

Crossing busy traffic circles is not easy, and the pedestrian crosswalks don’t actually provide access to them. Sherlock is waiting patiently, cane folded and grasped in his right hand, masquerading as anything but a blind man with a cane. John is at the curb, waiting for traffic to clear. 

_-You’re in the middle of a roundabout, you idiot. DO NOT MOVE.-_

He watches Sherlock’s hand come out of his pocket and hold his mobile beside his ear. He doesn’t look alarmed in the least.

Before John can get a gap long enough to dash across, an officer in a panda car has pulled up in front of him.

“That’s my friend,” John provides.

“How’d he get out there?” asks the officer.

“No idea,” John replies. “But he can’t see.”

And five minutes later, Sherlock is back with John, holding his arm more firmly than usual, and John is thanking the officer more profusely than necessary, and John wishes he had a video of the officer confronting Sherlock, and Sherlock looking disinterested, and the officer deliberately shaking out his cane to extend it, and placing it in Sherlock’s hand, then leading him back across the traffic, which had begrudgingly stopped when the officer blocked it with his car.

“Too early for a pint,” John says as he leads Sherlock down the pavement. 

“Tea then,” says Sherlock. He hasn’t had a long enough sulk, apparently, hasn’t worked the logistics of the whole thing out yet. It would have worked had he just stuck with his original plan to go to Mycroft’s, but the deviation did him in.

“I’m putting in for a guide dog for you,” John offers ten minutes later as they sit together over tea. “A dog would never have led you across that street.”

“I hate being blind,” Sherlock says. “And I don’t want a dog.”

“I hate waking up alone,” says John. It’s an inadequate thing to say, paling against Sherlock’s complaint. He stirs his tea and watches Sherlock feel for the milk, and add a touch. “Will you let me explain?”

“I understand you love her,” Sherlock says. “I understand she is your daughter – that there is no longer any distinction for you, that it doesn’t matter to you that she is not biologically yours.”

John reaches across the table and lays his hand on Sherlock’s.

“I found out less than a week before she was born. I punched the wall, broke my hand, and went on a four-day drinking binge. Lestrade found me and hauled me off to the hospital where Mary had gone into premature labour. She nearly died. I held Annie before Mary did. There was no going back once they placed her in my arms, Sherlock. She was mine.”

Sherlock stirs his tea. He doesn’t speak, and John understands that the conversation isn’t about logic, or reasoning, or anything tangible at all. Sherlock is grappling with emotions, what he felt nineteen years ago, what he felt last night, what he’s feeling now. And layered on those feelings are nineteen years of answering to someone else, of serving a sentence earned for doing something that mattered. To John. For John. Assuring him the life he wanted with the woman he loved.

There is a scar on Sherlock’s chest that speaks the words he does not say.

“Should I have tried to reach you then?” John asks now. Water under the bridge. Damage done. But he wants to know, and wants Sherlock to understand that his sacrifice, his gift, was not wasted.

Sherlock picks up his mug with both hands and sips his tea. They have not spoken of this – this thing, this act, this sacrifice – in all the months they’ve been together. They have leapt over the chasm, landed on the other side of their lives, and forged ahead. Looking back is difficult, painful, but, at the moment, utterly necessary.

“I believed she would be good for you. That she was what you wanted. That you loved her. That she loved you.”

John doesn’t agree or disagree. 

“Do you know when I knew I loved you?” he asks instead.

Sherlock lowers the mug, slowly, to the tabletop. He shakes his head.

“Yes you do.” John’s voice is low, just above a whisper. He reaches across again for Sherlock’s hand, and Sherlock turns it over and entwines their fingers.

“Right there on the tarmac,” John says. “Sherlock is _not_ really a girl’s name.”

“Rather late in the game to put it all together,” Sherlock replies. He is rubbing John’s hand with his thumb. He hasn’t offered forgiveness yet, but the caress is an apology of sorts, for leaving without a word. For wandering into traffic like a lost puppy.

“Slow learner,” John says. “You rather have to whack me over the head with it. Threaten to leave for six months or forever.”

“Ah.” Sherlock lets go of John’s hand and feels for his mug. He lifts it, takes a drink. “I’ll remember that for next time.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” John says. 

Sherlock nods absently, and they sit in silence.

“You know, then?” Sherlock asks after a time. The betrayal is multifaceted. He is struggling to push through it, as John struggled so long ago.

“It took me a lot longer than it took you,” John begins. “And there was a time, when she was two or three, when I thought she might be yours.” The admission is difficult and Sherlock is very quiet.

“The worst betrayal,” Sherlock says at last. His tea is gone cold, but he sips it anyway. “I can’t put it together, John. I was awake most of the night trying to wrap my head around it. Mycroft. Why?”

John shrugs. He has lived with this knowledge for all of Annie’s lifetime, but never once asked Mary to name the father or acknowledge her sin. Once, when he’d sat rocking his sleeping daughter, running his hand through her dark curls, Mary had leaned over his shoulder.

“It wasn’t Sherlock, John. She’s not his.”

John’s hand had paused and he stared into the tiny face, his heart a bit broken. “Right,” John had replied. “She’s mine.”

Sherlock’s hand grips his cup and John touches it as Sherlock continues. “She seduced him. She wanted something. Information on Magnussen. He must know.”

“She’s nineteen years old and he’s never said a word,” John replies. “Never as much as hinted. I can live with that. Sherlock - _we_ can live with that.”

“He didn’t come to the wedding.”

“Sherlock.” John reaches across and touches his arm, moves his hand up to graze the side of his neck. “Stop.”

Sherlock stops.

“It doesn’t matter,” John says. “It’s not about Mycroft.”

ooOoo

Annie Watson is as tall as John and looks very much like her mother, apart from her curly hair and bright eyes. She spends the rest of her week-long visit with her dad and Sherlock, and by the end of it, Sherlock no longer feels he made the wrong choice.

There is quite a bit of Sherlock in Mycroft Holmes. Quite a bit of Mycroft in Sherlock.

Quite a bit of them both in Annie Watson. But quite a bit more of John.

“Molly gave her a skull when she was six,” John tells Sherlock the night that Annie flies to Christchurch. “She took it with her everywhere.”

With nature pitted against nurture, John Watson is the obvious winner. Annie loves her father. Her father loves Annie. The Holmes brothers are incidental, at best, though Sherlock and Annie play Twenty Questions on the last night of her visit, and they are each so astoundingly competitive that they nearly get into a fight over the definition of “organic” and John has to be the arbitrator. 

But Annie flies away, as children do, and Sherlock and John remain.

And Sherlock stands behind John at the window as John watches the cab pull away, rests with his chin on John’s shoulder and his arms around his middle. It’s easy for John to forget, in moments like this, that Sherlock can’t see.

“I suppose this would be a good time to admit I was wrong,” Sherlock says and John lets out a surprised chuckle.

“Wrong?”

“It _doesn’t_ matter,” Sherlock says. “I’d do it again.”

John hopes he’ll never have to, but he believes Sherlock utterly. 

“I know,” he says. He wraps his arms around Sherlock’s neck and gives him the hug he wanted to give him nineteen years ago. “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story accepts the implied reality at the end of His Last Vow - that Sherlock has been "sentenced" to work for the British Govt., that John and Mary are married and having a baby, and that even with the "return" of Moriarty, Sherlock and John will effectively be separated from here forward.
> 
> And while I certainly don't think that this will actually happen, I used that as a set-up and skipped forward nineteen years, putting the focus on John and Sherlock, and giving them a rather substantial new obstacle to overcome.


End file.
